Another Statement

Workpractice
My practice can be described as photo sculpture or photo paper relief. Hundreds and sometimes thousand prints are layered into massive stacks. Each layer is glued on the other, pressed and dried. The latter are brought into a rough basic shape which is than modeled with woodcrafting techniques. The result looks like faces interfering with wood structures or landscapes. The process is time consuming, tool assisted and extremely repetitive. The dangers of boredom and self reference are only altered through tasks (and emotional moments) that come from the outside and insist in finding a form without breaking the concept, e.g. I had to create a huge portrait for a corridor like hall. Normally you would do a series of portraits aligned one after another to fill the biggest wall. Which made no sense due to the lack of distance in the corridor from presentation wall to spectator. I decided to use an anamorphic image to fill the complete floor with sheets instead. I filmed the process with a body rigged film camera. Due to outer production constraints I realized a work that includes moments of video installation, performance and site specifity which I have not done before.

Concept
Influenced by a the advantages and disadvantages of a second-generation immigrant background growing up in Frankfurt am Main my practice searches to resolve identity questions implicitly. Therefor I started using photocopies of my likeness as a sculpting material. A face is visible transcendence (J.P. Sartre) which seems something is visible and implies something which isn’t like a wall. This is the same as for any matter of human spectating where the depiction of a face is something very old and particular connected to our culture. The basic mechanism (of letting spectator standing in front of a wall asking for interpretation, text, likes, … but don’t give any shit) as a selfie does is already a boundary that makes me ask for the usage of images itself. Should we interpret or reuse this material as some sort of useful vehicle (that does not create hierarchical forms as images of celebrities or poor people we never care for)? From this point an intensive, meaning some sort of transient image is needed, which is explicable like the components of a watch. This production would be trying to equalize the phantasm of interpretation and hierarchy with the means of production. In doing so I am not thinking to create a new subject, a new man, but to trick subjectivity with its own weapons. The post structuralist term subjectivity puts a person into means of production and into a reign which is much deeper than himself (M. Foucault). Therefor I use the moments of assembly and production were they create their own cracks and flaws taking the image with them. This searches to evolve into a subjectivity that adapts and includes without racial or hierarchic effects.